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Comment by hackernewds | Hacker News Reader

These are pretty poor excuses to cope with piracy

I think that the poor excuses are in the other side. Adding DRM to files to actively preventing the user to choose in which devices he/she wants to read the file and for how long the content will be available goes against the whole concept of "buying" a book. When I buy a book I expect to be able to open it in ten years in whatever device I'm using, running any OS that I want. That's why we have standard formats. And I also expect that the quality of a book for which I payed 50-90€ for (because that is normally the price range) to have a good quality and at least a table of contents. A few occasions I had to manually add table of contents for books that otherwise would have been unusable to me.

"buying a book". You're not, though. Nor a film/movie. It is, at least in the US, treated as something along the lines of a temporary contract to view. And so... DRM is used to as a tool of enforcement of the contract term's expiration.

Hence piracy is the better option.

Piracy is the moral option.

Yeah, that's the whole problem.

If legal options aren’t useable, the black market will fill the void. Once this is fixed, the dynamic swings back (like how torrenting became less popular since streaming services) You might find it immoral, but 99% of the world disagrees with you (e.g. ubiquity of illegal drug use worldwide)

Maybe my perception is off, but it seemed to me that torrenting really dropped off a cliff when Netflix was dominant, and had basically everything available on it.

Then, when the streaming service market blew up because the content owners wanted to make more money by only offering their content on their own service (Disney+, CBS all access, etc.), torrenting went back up because it was no longer inexpensive for a streaming subscription, since you needed a dozen of them to cover everything you wanted to see (with usually only one show on one service that you care about).

Yeah definitely, the pendulum swings based on consumer satisfaction. Hopefully streaming can be federated in some way and we can get past this phase.

I kinda doubt it: doing so would decrease profits, because you wouldn't, for instance, be able to pay a tiny amount to just watch one show on Disney+ instead of having to buy a full subscription.

Instead, it's going to be like cable TV and landline telephone service: something new will come along to attract people's attention, and they'll just keep pissing customers off, and as more and more leave, the service will get worse and worse, and the prices higher and higher, to take advantage of the suckers who refuse to leave, until the whole thing finally implodes.

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